Black beauty

Feel free to tell us we’re wrong, but we think that Sir Peter Ogden’s Judel Vrolijk IRC 60, Jethou, is the best looking race boat on the water at present (heckle in the comment section at the bottom of the page, if you beg to differ). Like the cooler America’s Cup yachts, Jethou is finished in both hi-tech and alluring clear-coated carbon fibre and being an inshore day racer has a low freeboard for her length. The detail of the finish by her builders Green Marine is also right up there, for the Lymington-based company is good at all-black boats – many years ago now they also built Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli’s maxi, shadowy Stealth.
We were going to write about Jethou after she was launched last summer, but seeing as in these hard economic times and the chances slim of any new racing boats of this size being launched in 2010, we thought we’d hang on to our look at this peach of a boat until now.
Jethou, the boat, like the Channel Island he also owns, belongs to Sir Peter Ogden, a former investment banker and one time MD of Morgan Stanley, who made his fortune as one of the founders of Computacenter, which today describes itself as ‘Europe’s largest provider of IT infrastructure services’.
In the sailing world Ogden is best known for his long series of Swans, culminating in his heavily campaigned 601, Spirit of Jethou. After a top season in 2008 winning regattas in Porto Fino and coming second in Capri and the Swan Maxi Cup and in the Swan Maxi Series, Ogden felt the time had come to move on. According his boat captain Stuart Branson this was also because the other 601s Moneypenny, Artemis and CourdiLeone had moved to pastures new. “It was really exciting with the

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